Presently, the CCD sensor is usually used for sampling in most of digital camera system. An incident light will be transformed to an electronic signal by utilizing the CCD according to the photoelectric effect. Then, the electronic signal will be converted and digitized for an image process and recorded by an analog/digital converter. Moreover, the sampling format usually is a color filter array (CFA) format in order to reduce the size of sensor.
In digital sampling system using CCD as a sampling unit, there are three departments. The first department is involved in the image process in the CCD sampling system, such as optical black alignment compensation, defect prevention, white balance and auto-white balance, and the separation and interpolation of color signal of CFA. From these image processes, a colorful image signal corresponding to every picture pixel is obtained, and then, a correction and compensation process follows, such as lens flicker compensation, hue correction, gamma correction, border correction and brightness adjustment, etc.
Red (R), Green (G) and Blue (B) are three primary colors for images. When the CFA sampling format is used, only one color component of R, G, and B is taken at every sampling point. In order to make up the missing components for forming a complete color structure at every sampling point, a complicated calculation has to be performed to obtain two deficient colors by interpolation at every sampling point thereby enhancing the resolution of sampling image.
The so-called interpolation is to calculate and determine the unknown pixel among several known sampling points. There are lots of traditional computation methods for interpolation existing, such as nearest neighbor interpolation, bilinear interpolation, cubic B-spline interpolation and cubic convolution interpolation, etc. However, these traditional interpolation methods have their own defects respectively. For example, the calculating speeds of the nearest neighbor interpolation and bilinear interpolation are fast but lacking of good interpolation quality. A good image quality cannot be obtained because a blurred image always exists after the interpolation is done, so that the nearest neighbor interpolation and the bilinear interpolation are not suitable for use in the high resolution, high contrast image process system.
As to the cubic B-spline interpolation and the cubic convolution interpolation, they require many parameters for the interpolating calculation, so that their calculating processes are very complicated. By utilizing the cubic B-spline interpolation and the cubic convolution interpolation, a good and accurate interpolation value can be obtained but their complicated calculations take a lot of time. Therefore, the cubic B-spline interpolation and the cubic convolution interpolation are not suitable for implementing in a real-time digital color sampling system. Moreover, in the digital color sampling system with CCD and CFA sampling format, colorful stains and blurred borders always appear in the image after the interpolation is done by the traditional interpolation methods.
In order to enhance the image quality after interpolation, there are many methods provided, such as the discriminated color correlation approach and the enlarged neighborhood approach. However, the computational structures of these interpolation methods are too complicated. For example, many buffers are needed to record the parameters during the computation and numerous additions are required during the interpolation computation of two deficient colors in a sampling point. Therefore, the system source will be quickly consumed. If the aforementioned interpolation methods are implemented, the cost will increase greatly. Moreover, if the aforementioned interpolation methods are implemented in the real-time image process system, due to the long computing time for interpolation, the efficiency of the image process system will be decreased.